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    A Riddle from the Depths: Who Were These Mysterious People?
    A Riddle from the Depths: Who Were These Mysterious People?
    A Riddle from the Depths: Who Were These Mysterious People?
    Ebook130 pages2 hours

    A Riddle from the Depths: Who Were These Mysterious People?

    By James J. Brodell

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    About this ebook

    Sarah Goodnight, a 27-year-old expert on ancient languages, is underemployed and longing for a university professorship where she can make a meaningful contribution and get a regular paycheck. Her major social activity outside her tiny Chicago apartment is running 5ks and 10ks every couple of weeks. She earns her living translating ancient Sumerian and Akkadian tablets long-distance for the British Museum and admits that she has ignored her appearance and wardrobe while she commutes in ripped jeans and a faded sweatshirt from her bedroom to her home-office every day. In a rare outing she is surprised by a handsome man who claims to have a box of ancient tablets. The strange language on the tablets is new to Sarah and might have the potential to rewrite world history. But there are dangers and international complications. Not to mention professional jealousy. Can she find fame and love amid the mysterious unknown language contained in the clay tablets?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJames J. Brodell
    Release dateDec 25, 2019
    ISBN9780463386682
    A Riddle from the Depths: Who Were These Mysterious People?
    Author

    James J. Brodell

    James J. Brodell considers himself a skeptic or an iconoclast, perhaps due to the 50 years as a reporter and editor. His novels and short stories builds on the wacky incidents he has witnessed. He said he prefers short stories because he has a short attention span.

    Read more from James J. Brodell

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      Book preview

      A Riddle from the Depths - James J. Brodell

      A riddle from the depths:

      Who were these mysterious people?

      By

      James Brodell

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright © 2019 by James J. Brodell

      All rights reserved.

      Published by James J. Brodell at Smashwords

      ISBN: 9780463386682

      Prologue

      Sarah Goodnight, a 27-year-old expert on ancient languages, is underemployed and longing for a university professorship where she can make a meaningful contribution and get a regular paycheck. Her major social activity outside her tiny Chicago apartment is running 5ks and 10ks every couple of weeks. She earns her living translating ancient Sumerian and Akkadian tablets long-distance for the British Museum and admits that she has ignored her appearance and wardrobe while she commutes in ripped jeans and a faded sweatshirt from her bedroom to her home-office every day. In a rare outing she is surprised by a handsome man who claims to have a box of ancient tablets. The strange language on the tablets is new to Sarah and might have the potential to rewrite world history. But there are dangers and international complications. Not to mention professional jealousy. Can she find fame and love amid the mysterious unknown language contained in the clay tablets?

      Table of contents

      Chapter One: Enigma of the bags

      Chapter Two: A lucky meeting

      Chapter Three: A box of old clay

      Chapter Four: The academics are upset

      Chapter Five: The search begins

      Chapter Six: The work goes public

      Chapter Seven: Mystery after mystery

      Chapter Eight: The parents approve

      Chapter Nine: Time to bust theories

      Chapter Ten: Magnet for crime

      Chapter Eleven: In search of Kliem

      Chapter Twelve: Some cheap help

      Chapter Thirteen: Frustration after frustration

      Chapter Fourteen: A major discovery…maybe

      Chapter Fifteen: The critics gather

      Chapter Sixteen: More clues turn up

      Chapter Seventeen: Marriage comes first

      Chapter One: Enigma of the bags

      Sarah Goodnight swore that she never would carry a purse again. For the last six weeks she had studied nothing but purses or, more precisely, representations of purses in ancient art from all over the world. And there were plenty, from the walls of Sumer and reliefs from Akkad and Babylon in Mesopotamia to even the New World.

      These purses, held in the hand of a god or other supernatural being, had confounded researchers for nearly two centuries. Now yet another trio of purses turned up on a T-shaped pillar at Göbekli Tepe, that mysterious 22 acres of buried stone circles in southern Turkey.

      Scientists once thought that Sumer represented the dawn of civilization 6,500 years ago, Sarah mused, recalling the sensation caused when the giant monuments at Göbekli Tepe turned out to be at least 12,000 years old. And they still are digging, she noted.

      If people really knew how little we know, we all would be out of a job, Sarah said to herself. She thought of the long procession of professors and other experts who had taught dogmatic facts that turned out to be rubbish.

      Sarah, now 27, still single, terminally bookish and still living from paycheck to paycheck, had not had the challenge of standing in front of a class since graduate school. There were few academic openings for her specialty, the history of the ancient Middle East, particularly now when even universities considered to be cutting edge were padding their curriculums with courses like women’s studies, real estate, ice sculpting, wine tasting and even something called police science. Occidental College even has a course in stupidity, she recalled and then smiled at, well, the stupidity of it all.

      Sarah knew when she began her long trek to putting a Dr. before her name that her job possibilities would be limited. After all, those ancient cities that Sarah found so fascinating were to most just the junk pile of history unlikely to attract an auditorium of 300 eager students as well as warm the hearts of university administrators.

      I know every little bit helps, filling out the framework of human knowledge, but I need a big breakthrough to get myself noticed and maybe even an academic job, Sarah said to herself for the ten thousandth time.

      She did not lack work as an independent researcher. As one of the few in the world who knew the languages and could read the cuneiform writings of vanished Mideastern cultures, she had job security. The British Museum alone held 130,000 untranslated tablets and fragments. Job security was certain for the next 30 or 40 years until her eyes failed and she could not distinguish among the tiny chicken scratches impressed in clay by long-dead scribes.

      Although frustrating, her latest assignment was to compile a comprehensive list with photos of all the sculptures, rock art, paintings and reliefs that showed a character carrying a particular type of purse. When the assignment came in, Sarah thought this would be a week-long job, she remembered. How wrong she was. Everywhere she looked and in whatever time period there were characters carrying or holding what looked like a rectangular fabric purse with a semicircle handle. Most figures from Sumer and Babylon were winged. Some had beaks.

      The possible number of such artifacts was far more than Mesopotamian experts at the British Museum suspected, and Sarah was beginning to think that she was on to something of major importance. Now if she could only keep them paying so she could continue the work. There already had been grumblings about the length of the research and how much it cost. Every day or two Sarah would find increasingly demanding emails in her inbox.

      Finding the material was not hard. The internet is a wonderful tool. That was why she could work from her Chicago home. And that is how she managed to collect reliefs with bags from incredibly diverse cultures. In addition to the Middle East and Turkey, there were examples in India, Australia, New Zealand, China, Central America and even in the western United States.

      How did these very different cultures learn to copy the same small bag right down to the texture. Why did they do it? And even more importantly, what was in the bag? Sarah knew that if she could answer these questions, she would solve one of archaeology’s perplexing mysteries and guarantee herself a cushy academic job.

      She could see herself holding court amid dozens of admiring grad students.

      Fat chance, she said. I can’t even make a guess on how some Olmec artisan on the Gulf coast of Mexico would know about something carved into limestone 10,000 years earlier. And how the heck did the Maori warriors find out about the same thing?

      She chuckled as she remembered the thousands of internet site writers who said the answer to some of these questions were aliens who came to the earth as teachers or rulers. The Sumerians even made that part of their theology as a handful of god-like characters were named as the initiators of the human race. In their relief portraits they all carried little handbags, even those figures with bird heads.

      Most of the tablets were of no use. Sarah knew that the bulk of the British Museum holdings of clay texts came from the Library of Ashurbanipal that was buried in ruins when enemies overran the capital of Nineveh in the Seventh century B.C. By that time the device of the handbag was a consistent part of wall art, and there was no explanation, even on the reliefs that carried text.

      Sarah long ago dismissed the idea that the handbag was a traditional dress accessory like the purse of today. "There has got to be something important inside for all these characters to be carrying one. There was another clue. Nearly all these characters carried the purse below the waist in the right hand, but the left hand was raised and was taking or giving something like a small bunch of grapes or, as one researcher said, a pine cone.

      Sarah had been struggling to put these two clues together to create something meaningful. What would the gods carry in a jute bag that would be important enough to show up in the works of dozens of cultures, Sarah asked herself once again.

      She had seen speculation from serious academic circles. Some said the bag held knowledge being given from the gods. Others said the bag contained the seeds of the human race or human souls.

      Absent any real evidence, Sarah said to herself that what she needed was a plausible explanation. Most of history is just a string of plausible explanation, she said out loud.

      Sarah always had been surprised that there were no modern versions of the bag in western iconography. Jewish scribes wrote much of what is known today as the Old Testament in Babylon, so Sarah considered it a surprise that bags did not show up in Jewish or Christian art. That area had plenty of jute, which she assumed was the fabric used in the bags she studied. Most jute even today is woven into burlap bags.

      Sarah remembered that her internet searches showed mentions throughout the Jewish scriptures of a priest’s bag and also bags for bread and food, money and precious stones. She considered it obvious that anyone going on a trip in those days would carry some kind of bag. And then there were the bags of grain the Bible says Joseph gave to his brothers when they came begging in Egypt.

      But in no case were the biblical bags anything like the type Sarah was studying. And she did not think that ancient deities had any use for money. What could they be for? Sarah groaned, stopping short of hitting her head on the computer keyboard.

      Composing herself, Sarah delved back in her mind to that boring Philosophy 101 class she took in her freshman year at Columbia. Deductive reasoning, she told herself as she shifted her thin frame in her computer chair. That is what you use when you have clues but not enough evidence. That’s what Sherlock Holmes used. And now I am the Sherlock of fabric bags.

      "What do

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